Live data from Hacker News

New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

blog.adafruit.com

521–530 of 861 posts

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#521
post #33

This is insanely stupid stuff. Even the UK with our weird panic over Incredibly Specific Knives hasn't tried to do this kind of technical restriction to prevent people printing guns. Why not? Because nobody is printing guns! It's an infeasible solution to a non-problem! Someone should dig into who this is coming from and why. The answers are usually either (a) they got paid to do it by a company selling the tech, whi…

Tbf to New York it is much easier to print a gun in the us I imagine than Europe for example a 3d printed Glock the controlled part is the lower which is just a plastic shell that ends up containing the trigger group and a few other parts which you can all by easily online the only other thing you need is the upper which is just the slide barrel and a few other parts you can buy them online already completed the only part you actually have to file a form for and get approved for the is lower specifically the plastic shell so in the us once you print that which is pretty simple you can order everything else online no need to file or register anything I imagine in the eu the other parts are much more controlled which raises the complexity by a ton you’d need a lot of tools/parts and expertise to create a ghost Glock in the eu that you wouldn’t in America and you’d still probably need some street connections for the ammo which is much easier to come by in America I’d bet. If it was as simple to get your hands on all the other parts in the eu I would imagine there would much much more 3d printed guns there. I still think it’s stupid everyone should be allowed to print as many glocks as they want especially if your having to live in New York

Also atleast in America there is a very large 3d printed gun community lots of people are doing it I suggest checking out the PSR YouTube channel it’s a guy who is basically a real life dead pool who’s 3d printed every gun you can think of his videos are very entertaining and while you won’t learn much since YouTube restricts any teaching of gun manufacturing you may be surprised at how far 3d printed guns have come. His plastikov v4 video is good and pretty funny if I remember.

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad everyone jumped shipped to Bambuu Labs. If only we still had open source hardware.

Prusa is still kicking... if open source hardware is your priority.

Prusa had been moving towards proprietary licensing (if they release files at all) for a while now, due to their open source design files being used to undercut the original with cheaper clones.

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#524

I thought all printers had in place block to stop printing of money so something like that to stop printing and making of firearms etc is not unrealistic

It’s more complicated than that. A 2D rectangle with certain graphics is entirely different than a single part of a gun which may really look like anything. Would you recognize a trigger sear if I showed you one?

And if 3DP gun designers get blocked, they just have to alter the design slightly. Vs counterfeit currency which always and forever must look the same. If the 3DP database detection is loosened to catch lookalikes, then you have false positives for the guy making a desk lamp whose part just kinda sorta looks like a trigger sear.

Also, I am not aware of any open source 2D printers built from the ground up, but 3DP got started that way. So bypassing this would be insanely easy.

It’s political theater.

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#525
post #144

Should flour, yeast, water, and ovens be banned, and only commercial bakeries be allowed to make bread? I know guns are different. There are also an enormous amount of ways to cause harm. I personally think that, ideally, nobody should have guns. That's not the world we live in, though. A political government body should not infringe on privacy of individuals because some small percentage may cause harm. I can make a…

You can buy a thing for your fingernails, a thing for your hair, and a thing for your drains, and put them together to hurt a lot of people (though likely and ideally only yourself), but those things are not banned.

Since when peroxiacetone requires NAOH?

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#526
post #368
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it’s illegal to make a gun for personal use without a serial number in ny and ca. https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/consu...

So it's okay to 3D print a gun as long as you have a serial number? That seems to reinforce that 3D printing shouldn't be banned, especially by blanket technical means.

That is the essence of the weird gun laws. Take a Glock pistol as an example. The only part that has a serial number and is legally “the gun” is the thing you hold in your hand: the frame. It’s plastic and has the trigger and some parts to hold the magazine.

The rest of the stuff? You can buy and overnight ship it to yourself legally with almost no regulation (as of 2026 CA requires more gun-like treatment for those parts).

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? The printer only ever retrieves G code for individual parts without any knowledge of what they are going to be assembled into. There is no viable way to solve this classification problem on this kind of incomplete data, is there?

Btw, AFAIK they also want to lock down the slicer.

How the hell can you do that.

GCODE is mostly about pure maths and geometry (well, there's other stuff but in principle). They would forbid math? "Euclid is illegal."

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And when you're done that, can you build another one and sell it to me? Yep, that's exactly what the fed undercover will say. And sure, they can't catch everyone, but they don't have to. They just need to catch and visibly prosecute enough people to create a chilling effect. It's about making it harder, not making it impossible. Whether the cost/benefit here justifies those gains is a different question.

The RIAA tried that. It did not go well for them, and piracy has never been more prevalent or easy.

Are you sure about that? All the normies use streaming services for music and movies. Techies around here tend to too. The normies don't know about and can't work torrents. They can't even work their own file system. The techies decry it as "inconvenient".

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not nearly that hard of a problem. There are n gun files on internet, so validate the hash of those n files (g code whatever). These people aren’t cadding their own designs.

One big part of this is that gcode isnt really a 3d model its a set of instructions on how to move the printhead around. You don't download the gcode directly, because that varies by printer. You download a model, and then a slicing program turns that into a set of printer-specific gcode. Any subtle settings changes would change the hash of this gcode. And the printer doesn't really know what the model is. It would h…

Given that quite simple G-code, say a pair of nested circles with code for tool changes/accessory activation, can make two wildly different parts depending on which machine it is run on:

- a washer if run on a small machine in metric w/ flood coolant

- a lamp base if run on a larger router in Imperial w/ a tool changer

and that deriving what will be made by a given G-code file in 3D is a problem which the industry hasn't solved in decades, the solution of which would be worthy of a Turing Award _and_ a Fields Medal, I don't see this happening.

A further question, just attempting it will require collecting a set of 3D models for making firearms --- who will persuade every firearms manufacturer to submit said parts, where/how will they be stored, and how will they be secured so that they are not used/available as a resource for making firearms?

A more reasonable bit of legislation would be that persons legally barred from owning firearms are barred from owning 3D printers and CNC equipment unless there is a mechanism to submit parts to their parole officer for approval before manufacturing, since that's the only class of folks which the 2nd Amendment doesn't apply to, and a reasonable argument is:

1st Amendment + 2nd Amendment == The Right to 3D Print and Bear Arms

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#530

My main concern is, how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician.

> how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician At least 25 years. That's the time passed since the first introduction of Eurion marks on banknotes. As far as I know, noone has used it to block reproduction of anything oth…

Lots non-currency of documents around the world with EURion marks. If you're a secure printing shop and your business model primarily revolves around impressing your clients with long lists of document security features, it'd be malpractice to not implement this kind of padding.
Post reply on HN